CHAPTER XVIII.
MULTITUDINOUS LIFE
“This great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.”
Ps. civ. 25.
“The dense immensity
Of ever-stirring Life, in thy strange forms
Of fish and shell and worm and oozy mud.”
Kingsley.
SOME thirty or forty years ago the knowledge which man had of the “Great Deep” was practically nil.
We know a good deal more now, thanks to the famous voyage of the Challenger, and to many other observations, though still the full sum of our information is small compared with the much that we do not know.
In the year 1872 the good ship Challenger quitted British shores for her long tour of discovery. During nearly three years and a half she cruised about the world, dipping her instruments into the water at frequent intervals, measuring the depths, studying the temperatures, making note of other conditions, and bringing up from the ocean-bed materials whereby to judge of the state of that dark nether-world, hidden from our eyes by intervening miles of water.